Colin Dayan

Colin Dayan
File:Colin Dayan.jpg
Website	http://colindayan.com/

Colin Dayan, also known as Joan Dayan, is the Robert Penn Warren Professor in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University, where she teaches American studies, comparative literature, and the religious and legal history of the Americas. She has written extensively on prison law and torture, Caribbean culture and literary history, as well as on Haitian poetics, Edgar Allan Poe, and the history of slavery. After receiving her Ph.D. from the City University of New York Graduate Center in 1980, she taught at Princeton University, Yale University, the City University of New York, the University of Arizona, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Dayan is the author of eight books, the first of which was A Rainbow for the Christian West (1977); an introduction to René Depestre's poetry and a translation of his long poem Un arc-en-ciel pour l'occident chrétien. She then turned to the subject of early American literature and published Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe's Fiction (1987). Her next book, Haiti, History, and the Gods (1995, 1998) reorients the study of Haitian history through what she calls "literary fieldwork". In the process, she recasts many boundaries: between politics and poetics, between the secular and the sacred, and between the colonizer and the colonized, those who deemed themselves masters and those who worked as slaves. The Story of Cruel and Unusual (2007), focuses on the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment and traces the precedents for the torture of detainees in the "war on terror".

The Law is a White Dog, How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons was published in Spring 2011. Her next book was With Dogs at the Edge of Life (2016). Dayan’s memoir In the Belly of Her Ghost (2019) takes readers to the Jim Crow South through the voice of her mother, who appears as muse, fury, and haunt. Animal Quintet (2020) is about her relationship with her family, and the relationship she has always had with animals, in the context of her childhood in the South.

External links

• Law School Bio
• "A Devilish Way of Thinking", Boston Review
• "Into the Crud", Public Books
• "Destroying the Soul", The Washington Post
• "Barbarous Confinement", The New York Times
• "Dead Dogs: Breed bans, euthanasia, and preemptive justice", Boston Review
• "Civilizing Haiti", Boston Review
• "Dangerous Dogs", London Review of Books
• "Between the Devil and the Deep Sea", Boston Review
• "Out of Defeat: Aimé Césaire's Miraculous Words", Boston Review
• "The Story of Cruel and Unusual"
• "Words Behind Bars", Boston Review
• "Cruel and Unusual", Boston Review
• Lecture "The Story of Cruel and Unusual" (November 7, 2007)
• Lecture "Words Behind Bars" (May 8, 2008)
• Colin Dayan Website